AMR within pits

Wide Bay Water, Maryborough, Queensland

Taggle worked with Wide Bay Water (WBW) to provide a low cost wide-area AMR system across residential and industrial areas.

Wide Bay Water (WBW), owned by the Fraser Coast Regional Council, provides water and waste-water services to almost 100,000 residents across an area of over 7,000 square kilometres. Keen to use the latest technology, Wide Bay Water became one of the first water authorities in Australia to implement a wide-area automatic meter reading (AMR) system for domestic water meters in 2006-7 with funding assistance from government.

When WBW heard about Taggle’s low-cost systems, they approached us to roll out a trial AMR system in two Maryborough locations:

A commercial/industrial area to study the case for more frequent meter reading of major water users.

We used super-sensitive receivers to overcome the issues with meters installed in pits. These receivers receive signals from transmitters located in pits or under metal lids as long as they have a small hole. The submersion risk can still be a challenge but by mounting the transmitter on the underside of the lid, much of the submersion risk can be mitigated.

Our system provides WBW with hourly interval data in an open standard format for integration with their existing water management systems. Having installed AMR across the entire DMA, WBW can run daily mass balances to identify non-revenue water usage in a timely manner.